What’s the Canucks’ biggest problem? Maybe it’s the players

MONTREAL — Bruce Boudreau is a players’ coach. It just doesn’t seem like the Vancouver Canucks are a coach’s players.

If you think president of hockey operations Jim Rutherford knee-capped Boudreau this week with his public criticism of structure and accountability, look what the players did to their coach on Wednesday.

Forty-three seconds into a game against the Montreal Canadiens, veteran Tanner Pearson took his seventh minor penalty of the season — a lazy and obvious hook in the offensive zone — and 12 seconds after that, Nick Suzuki’s shot from distance went through Thatcher Demko’s pads to make it 1-0.

Later in the period, Canucks leader J.T. Miller duffed whatever he was trying to do with the puck under moderate pressure, turning it over in the Vancouver slot to Kirby Dach, who bobbled it through Demko to make it 3-0 at 12:23.

Demko, the struggling starter whom Boudreau keeps rolling out, couldn’t come up with enough saves when it mattered and by the end of the Canadiens’ 5-2 win, had been outplayed yet again by the opposition goalie and was still stuck on one win for the season. Demko did not talk to reporters after the game.

Canucks rookie Jack Rathbone, the talented defenceman a lot of fans want to see in the lineup more often, made critical mistakes with the puck on the final two Montreal goals.

Sure, the Canucks pushed in the third period, outshooting the Canadiens 15-5 and briefly cutting a 4-0 lead in half on goals by Luke Schenn and Nils Hoglander. But the mistakes the Canucks made — the turnovers, defensive breakdowns and inept penalty killing — are as unsurvivable in November and they were in October.

This is the National Hockey League.

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The Canucks are 4-7-3 and most of their losses have looked the same. The order of the goals they surrender is different, but the means and volume are largely unchanged since the season began. The team has allowed at least four goals in 10 of 14 games, and fewer than three only once.

This does not look like the performance of players who love their coach, even if the Canucks actually like Boudreau and want him to continue. Of course, why wouldn’t they like him? He keeps playing them, keeps supporting them.

But while Rutherford’s criticism of structure, and the implications of those comments for the coaching staff, received most of the public’s attention on Monday, one of the most important and under-reported things he told Sportsnet 650 radio was this: “We’re at a point now. . . where we have to make players more accountable. We’ll have to take the necessary steps to get players’ attention.”

Because the losses, so far, don’t seem to have been enough.

“All turnovers hurt,” Boudreau said after the game, “especially when they end up in the back of your net, whether it’s J.T., whether it’s Bo, Petey, all of them. You can’t make that play (that Miller did in front of his net), but there was an awful lot of other plays that we shouldn’t have made either.”

Later, he added: “Those are frustrating. The giveaways, the not being able to handle the puck on a pass in the neutral zone, letting pucks bounce over your stick when you’ve got them, those are killers.”

Always have been in hockey, always will be.

The Canucks have been able to outscore their problems in three-quarters of their wins (since there have been only four, the arithmetic on this is easy). But there is something inherently wrong with a team that is tied for seventh in NHL scoring, has a 12-goal scorer in Bo Horvat, an 18-point scorer in Elias Pettersson and a point-per-game defenceman in Quinn Hughes – and still has won only four of 14 games.

“All of us can be better,” Pettersson said Wednesday. “I can be better, I can pick guys up, I can be more vocal with things that I say. Everyone can be better at doing what they’re good at.”

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There don’t seem to be enough guys good at defending.

And yet, there were the Canucks halfway through the third period, having climbed back to 4-2, hitting two posts on one power play on shots by Miller and Hughes.

“If I could bottle it up and find out, I’d be a rich man,” Boudreau said when asked about the extreme swings in performance during games. “No matter how you push it, you just never know which period is going to be good and which period is going to be bad. For this team to go anywhere, they’ve got to be consistent, and we haven’t had a game yet where we’ve allowed less than three goals except for the Pittsburgh game. Unless you start defending, I mean, it’s not going to happen.”

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On not pulling Demko for in-form backup Spencer Martin, Boudreau said: “I’ve got to keep him in there. He’s got to fight through these things. Any of the good goaltenders that I’ve had, they want to stay in there, they want to find it. I thought at the beginning of the second he made a couple of good saves, and I thought it was going to be there. But then things still leak through.”

On Rathbone: “I think he makes rookie mistakes. There are times he does. He wants to do great like every player out there. But sometimes you try too hard to be perfect and then the perfect thing doesn’t happen.”

On Pearson finishing with two O-zone penalties: “That’s not good and that’ll be addressed tonight and tomorrow. That should never happen to anybody, let alone a guy that’s won two Cups and knows exactly what he’s supposed to be doing.”

We don’t know if Boudreau would have held Pearson accountable in the game. He left with an injury soon after serving his second penalty.

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